Germinie Lacerteux Part 17

One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she pa.s.sed a wine-shop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.

She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the door of the wine-shop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a milestone. In her att.i.tude there was an air of stern determination and the necessary patience to wait there forever. The pa.s.sers-by, the carriages, the street--she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were far away. The tow-horse, waiting to a.s.sist in drawing the omnibuses up the hill,--a white horse, he was,--stood in front of her, worn out and motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog.

It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving, with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening, desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by Darkness at a wine-shop door!

At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.

"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to possess a conscience, for whom there is no G.o.d, no police, no a.s.sizes, no scaffold--nothing!

Jupillon felt that his customary _blague_ was arrested in his throat.

"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't lost. But I must have time.

Just now, you see, work ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months' time, I promise. Are you pretty well?"

"_Canaille!_ Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd sneak away, would you? But it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber!

sneak! It was you."

Germinie hurled these words in his face, pus.h.i.+ng against him, forcing him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned toward him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to you to make you strike me?"

She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pa.s.s,--the guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost her! Her heart collapsed in antic.i.p.ation at the thought of emptying itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was bursting.

"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.

"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed a police officer, grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees wavered: she thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of the street.

LVI

Pa.s.sion is subject to the most insensate reactions, the most inexplicable revivals. The accursed love that Germinie believed to have been killed by all the wounds and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it came to life once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart when she returned home. The mere sight of the man, his proximity for those few moments, the sound of his voice, the act of breathing the air that he breathed, were enough to turn her heart back to him and relegate her to the past.

Notwithstanding all that had happened, she had never been able to tear Jupillon's image altogether from her heart: its roots were still imbedded there. He was her first love. She belonged to him against her own will by all the weaknesses of memory, by all the cowardice of habit.

Between them there were all the bonds of torture that hold a woman fast forever,--sacrifice, suffering, degradation. He owned her, body and soul, because he had outraged her conscience, trampled upon her illusions, made her life a martyrdom. She belonged to him, belonged to him forever, as to the author of all her sorrows.

And that shock, that scene which should have caused her to think with horror of ever meeting him again, rekindled in her the frenzied desire to meet him again. Her pa.s.sion seized her again in its full force. The thought of Jupillon filled her mind so completely that it purified her.

She abruptly called a halt in the vagabondage of her pa.s.sions: she determined to belong thenceforth to no one, as that was the only method by which she could still belong to him.

She began to spy upon him, to make a study of his usual hours for going out, the streets he pa.s.sed through, the places that he visited. She followed him to Batignolles, to his new quarters, walked behind him, content to put her foot where he had put his, to be guided by his steps, to see him now and then, to notice a gesture that he made, to s.n.a.t.c.h one of his glances. That was all: she dared not speak to him; she kept at some distance behind, like a lost dog, happy not to be driven away with kicks.

For weeks and weeks she made herself thus the man's shadow, a humble, timid shadow that shrank back and moved away a few steps when it thought it was in danger of being seen; then drew nearer again with faltering steps, and, at an impatient movement from the man, stopped once more, as if asking pardon.

Sometimes she waited at the door of a house which he entered, caught him up again when he came out and escorted him home, always at a distance, without speaking to him, with the air of a beggar begging for crumbs and thankful for what she was allowed to pick up. Then she would listen at the shutters of the ground-floor apartment in which he lived, to ascertain if he was alone, if there was anybody there.

When he had a woman on his arm, although she suffered keenly, she was the more persistent in following him. She went where they went to the end. She entered the public gardens and ballrooms behind them. She walked within sound of their laughter and their words, tore her heart to tatters looking at them and listening to them, and stood at their backs with every jealous instinct of her nature bleeding.

LVII

It was November. For three or four days Germinie had not fallen in with Jupillon. She went to hover about his lodgings, watching for him. When she reached the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of light struggling out through the closed shutters. She approached and heard bursts of laughter, the clinking of gla.s.ses, women's voices, then a song and one voice, that of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred of her heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead before her, and whose death she had so often sought to discover in the coffee-grounds,--the cousin!

She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what they said, absorbed in the torture of listening to them, pasturing her famished heart upon suffering. It was a cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the cold or rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The voice she detested seemed at times to grow faint and die away beneath kisses, and the notes it sang died in her throat as if stifled by lips placed upon the song. The hours pa.s.sed. Germinie was still at her post. She did not think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge of what she was waiting for. It seemed to her that she must remain there always, until the end. The rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided down her neck. An icy s.h.i.+ver ran up and down her back. The water dripped from her dress to the ground. She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in any of her limbs except the pain that flowed from her heart.

Well on toward morning there was a movement in the house, and footsteps approached the door. Germinie ran and hid in a recess in the wall some steps away, and from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something soft and warm on her hands that frightened her at first; it was a dog licking her, a great dog that she had held in her lap many an evening, when he was a puppy, in the _cremiere's_ back shop.

"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently twice or thrice in the darkness.

The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled about her, and at last entered the house. The door closed. The voices and singing lured Germinie back to her former position against the shutter, and there she remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be drenched, as she listened and listened, till morning, till daybreak, till the hour when the masons on their way to work, with their dinner loaf under their arms, began to laugh at her as they pa.s.sed.

LVIII

Two or three days after that night in the rain, Germinie's features were distorted with pain, her skin was like marble and her eyes blazing. She said nothing, made no complaints, but went about her work as usual.

"Here! girl, look at me a moment," said mademoiselle, and she led her abruptly to the window. "What does all this mean? this look of a dead woman risen from the grave? Come, tell me honestly, are you sick? My G.o.d! how hot your hands are!"

She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it down.

"What a silly s.l.u.t! you're in a burning fever! And you keep it to yourself!"

"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I think it's nothing but a bad cold. I went to sleep the other evening with my kitchen window open."

"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle; "you might be dying and you'd never as much as say: 'Ouf!' Wait."

She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her arm-chair to a small table by the fireplace, she wrote a few lines in her bold hand.

"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do me the favor to give this to your friend Adele and have her send the concierge with it. And now to bed you go!"

But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth while. She would not tire herself. She would sit down all day. Besides, the worst of her sickness was over; she was getting better already. And then it always killed her to stay in bed.

The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came in the evening. He examined Germinie, and ordered the application of croton oil. The trouble in the chest was of such a nature that he could say nothing about it until he had observed the effect of his remedies.

He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed and sounded her chest for a long while.

"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle, when he went downstairs; "she has had pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name? Oh! the energy of some women! How old is she?"

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure? She looks fully fifty."

"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please. What can you expect?

Never in good health,--always sick, disappointment, sorrow,--and a disposition that can't help tormenting itself."